Billy Bragg

musical output stands apart from an above comparison. In the mid eighties and era driven by production, he was all about songs and was one of the great standard bearers of political music, carried on from both the folk and punk traditions. In his conversation with Bruce Headlam, Bragg talks about music as a political tool and whether it can

truly affect change. Reminisces about his first trip to the US and eighty four opening for Echo and the Bunnyman, and his collaboration with Willcoe to bring unpublished Woody Guthrie songs to life. This is broken record Lander notes for the digital age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Bruce Headlerman conversation with Billy Bragg.

We come through the clouds and as the plane banked I'm not a happy flyer. So I listened to music when I'm not watching films, particularly landing and takeoff, and it's just on random. It just goes for I don't like the track, I'll just bang forward till I find something like a scarboroughfare come on by Simon and Garfank call. And as it did, the plane banked exactly the same way,

and I looked down. I thought, I got it. I'm getting a thingle talking about it now, thinking back to that first time we came to the United States of

America in August of nineteen eighty four. It was swotering hot and the Olympics were on the La Olympics, I think, and we stayed in the Iroquois Hotel in Midtown and I had four or five nights performing on the roof of the dance Materia, which was an amazing introduction to life in America, not least because looking uptown from the dance Materia from where I was standing on the stage, the vista was absolutely dominated by the Empire State Building, which lit up as the sun went down, the lights

on it. It was like, Okay, this is it, this is America. Here we are let's do this. So yeah, I'm very happy memories of toom of our under bunnyman in nineteen eighty four because I stayed on the bus where the bunny men were on the bus the first half, and then they got bored and started flying. But I had me and my best friend from school, WIGGI came with me, and we stayed on the tour bus and as a result saw a lot more of America than if we had just seen the airports and the hotels.

driving for twelve hours. He looked to me like, you don't know half of its son. So yeah, that the vastness of America.

driving in and out of Memphis. Forget it. We'll just it will just be a truck stop somewhere. You'll be fine. You'll be able to get a meal and a coffee. And I was like, So I went back with the crew, the lighting crew and the sound crew, and I said, look, there's nine of us. If we all put ten bucks in remember this nineteen eighty four as well, we will put ten bucks in and give him ninety bucks. We might be able to bribe him to go asleep for four hours in the car park at Gracelands, and I

was like, that's got to be worth ten parks. So we put it together. We made him off. He was very grumpy about it, but he did do it. I remember him saying to us, remember where we parked, and so we got that. We actually got to go around Gracelands before Priscilla tided it up. So we saw the kind of the depths, the pile of the carpet in the jungle room, the room with all the gold records down the side, and the costumes reminded me of how a Carter said when he opened two chunk Harmen's tomb.

Everywhere a glint of gold. It's like we would come to see, you know, the Pharaoh Memphis as well. I mean that kind of yeah. That kind of made it even more like we were come to see the boy King. And then when we got to New Orleans, we woke up on the band decided to go to Bourbon Street. So I went with them and we saw this guy playing. I'll think of his what was his name. I'd never heard of him before or since, Mason Rufner. I think his name was slick back guy, skinny guy playing its

black telecaster. Incredible thing. But he did this thing where he went down the notes in the basstring of the telecaster with his elbow while pointing at the audience like that thing like it. And you remember, this is all in one day. This is the day where we woke up still in Illinois. So that passage of time where we went from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. You know, I've never done anything like that. Again. I've traveled, you know, I've done some huge drives, I've done some great journeys.

I've been in some amazing situations, But in twenty four hours, I don't think I ever did anything as mind blowing as what we did in that drive from Chicago to New Orleans.

political Elvis. You know Elvis that for his Christmas Special in nineteen sixty eight has specially written for him if I Can Dream, and sings it at the end of the Christmas Special in front of the big words Elvis and looks into the camera and sings this incredible song, which in the wake of nineteen sixty eight, which is in the year where Dr King was assassinated and Bobby Kennedy was assassinated while they were making the Christmas Special while they were filming it, to say to talk about

a dream, you know, having a dream in which our brothers walk hand in hand. I mean, that's that's pretty brave, that's pretty political. And then he comes out within the ghetto and goes to that run of great thing was briefly, you know, there's a there's a moment there where you might think Elvis could pick up the mantle of the the Kennedy Brothers and unify America. Because he doesn't. He goes to Gracelands and takes loads of amphetamines. But the

possibility of that is interesting. It's it's a really it's a really great moment in pop history as well. And it's he does he does it because he I mean, he specifically asked to do it. Colonel Parker wants him to finish with I'll behind by Christmas, a dreadful you know, sort of modeling Christmas song, and he's like, I need something else, so he gets his musical director to come up with this if I Can Dream, and and he really goes for it. If you watch the clip it's on YouTube, it is even.

beat was going to films because Elvis did. Even Lonnie Doneghan made a film, you know, that's what they did. They they followed his route, but he was just making it up as he was going along. And I think because he's shone so brightly, he was ultimately consumed by his own his own fame, his own image, his own elvisness. There's never been anyone touch what he did and who

he was and what he meant to people. And I think for my generation, as I say, if you're going to take on that rock and roll mantle, you can't ignore him.

It's like it doesn't it even seem to have a start, and it trails off at the end and it's gone. It's really gone, gone, gone, you know.

doing with lead Belly staff in the UK. Weirdly, almost at the same time. I mean, that's all right, mama. Obviously, his first recording came the fifth of July in nineteen fifty four. Lonnie Donegan recorded rock Online a week later on the thirteenth of July in London. I mean, how that was just out in the air somewhere something so in sinjury could happen at the same time.

do that. I think maybe he shone so brightly that when you go you know, for example, when I went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I don't know if you've ever been there, but he is presented as the first rock and roll star, and a lot of the people who were called rock and roll stars before him like Big Joe Turner and Ruth Brown are just considered these sort of the pioneers they like to call them. And by the way, Elvis, the Elvis Enterprises owns that part of the rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Ye,

so I'm sure it's presented the way they want. Nobody, but I thought, well, and you know, you have this little thing like who do you think should be in the rock and Roll Hall of Fame? I thought, well, Arthur Croud up because he did the original version. And if you hear the original version, it's got a lot of the the elements. It's not that totally transformed. And you're like, nobody knows him. No, nobody knows Mabel. I've

forgotten her name, my accent, pardon me my action. No, the did the original hound Dog.

It was a load of forces coming together around that time in the UK culturally among young people, and I was looking for a book that explained how happened, and no one had written it, so I ended up writing it myself, and it was that urge to find it out. I think that really really helped. I'm really proud that in the book Rock Island Line doesn't come out until chapter thirteen.

with real proper obscure stuff that you never find a home. So, well, what is.

they did that was by playing the guitar. Just there weren't many guitars in British popular music prior to the mid nineteen fifties, and it's Donnegan and then Elvis that kind of brings that in, you know, but it is school kids, I mean is it's like a playground craze. You know. When Lonnie Donegan plays in Liverpool in nineteen fifty six, George Harrison goes every night. I think he's thirteen.

McCartney's fourteen, he goes one night, and Lennon who's sixteen, don't know if he went, but in the weeks that followed he formed the Quarrymen. So we are talking about school boys. And the reason why that's significant is because by the time they were twenty one, twenty two and twenty three, those Skiffle Kids have been playing live music, mostly chuck Berry rock and roll type music for five

or six years. They were kind of road hardened. So when the Beatles break America in nineteen sixty four, there's a whole cadre of British bands ready to follow them, you know, and every single one of those British Invasion bands were all skifflers, and I think that didn't happen to white American use until the folk boom, which is later fifty nine sixty, you know, until you get to Kingston Trio and acts like that.

invasion possible. So skiff al was the nursery of the British invasion.

and teaching them classical music. So Barrett Strong, a lot of those guys, Norman Whitfield, when they showed up, they were they knew music, very small range, and so we tend to think of, you know, music as some sort of primordial scream.

done this. So I started, you know, just writing sort of songs that were broadly imitative of the music that I was into, which was American singer songwriters and Tamla motown. You know, they're the two things that I listened to most at that age.

for an eleven year old. It took me out of my little world into a completely different world and something magical in it, the storytelling, the sound of it, and I kind of started, really, I must have been really into music. My parents that following Christmas brought me a real to real tape recorder so I could record songs on the radio. Have to buy me records basically, which

is smart. And if I lug this around the corner to my mate's house, his sister Leslie, who was probably fifteen at the time, older than us, but she had a brilliant record collection. She had quite a few Simon and Garfuncle records and several Motown chartbuster compilations. And I'm more or less taped Leslie Charmer's record collection, and that served me my apprentices that I then started trying to write songs like Paul Simon and Smokey Robinson and still do some days.

whole notion of the craft of songwriting. You know, I will take songs apart me and think about tracks of my tears as three chords. It's possibly the greatest three card trick of all time. You know.

my house around that time. But it took these two guys from Brooklyn recording this old English folk song to turn me onto my own folk music, which is a weird paradoxical way. What goes around comes around with saying folk music.

framework from music you like. I always say to people they want to start writing songs, take your favorite song, take the words out of it and write your own words because it's your favorite song. You'll know exactly how the words are supposed to fit. And then you that's how you know, make your own words, make you know, maybe keep the chorus and change the words to I will Always love you, to give it a happy ending or something, whatever you want to do, that's how you

start to do it. That's what I did, basically. You know, you just take a Chuck Berry song apart, and that's my simplest thing, and then put your own words on it. And then eventually, when I was about twenty I suppose maybe twenty one, I wrote a Billy Bragg song. I wrote a song that didn't.

me into the songs. Also read somewhere that you were bullied as a kid that kind of yeah, I was sort of. You know, it got a bit towards the end of our school years. It all got a bit larry at school, so I tended to not go in so much. You know, it's too much mm hmm, too much grief. It just made me. Gave me a lot of anxiety around town. So you know, the sort of things that other people, other kids my age did not go out to the pubs and go out dancing and stuff.

I just didn't, you know, I just gave me, just give me too much anxiety. So I was fortunate. I had a couple of mates who had a guitar and a drum kit, and we sat in my mum's back room and wrote songs and played music. It's saved my own life.

of music is fundamentally empathy. You're as a writer, you're asking the listener to listen to this person in this situation and feel something for them in a situation you might not have experienced as a person. But this person here, you know, listen to that. Or there's another way whereby the person who's written the song has somehow touched a nerve with you, and in that case you draw empathy from the song. You're getting some of yourself, you're feeling

and you're not alone. This song, you know, is somehow articulating something you can't put into words. We all have songs like that, you know, and that, and that's really really valuable because I think, you know, the the sense of isolation that we have in society, which is always been that's not just a manifestation of the digital wage. I've always been there. And when people come together to celebrate and to sing, whether it's in church, at soccer games,

it happens people sing, you know. Obviously music concerts, you get a moment where you feel you're not alone. You're not the only person who cares about this thing, whatever this thing is.

it became much easier. You didn't have to justify being in the band. Everyone was in a band. Uh. Then there was a there was a confidence in that as well, because it was like our generation were coming to the fore. Now this is who we are.

great pop albums, and they're you know, they're amazing. And then you get to volume five, I think, and all of a sudden things start. Something's changed. You get you know, Ball of Confusion by the Temptations, You've got War by Edwin Starr, you know, and there's a change of tone. Something's happened, and the clue is in the record Marvin Gaye sings Abraham Martin and John and what has happened is Dr King has been murdered and along with the

rest of African American and culture motowns reflecting that. So I kind of picked up on on that politics, the politics of civil rights and as also doing a singer songwriters that I listened to as well. You know, the early Dylan records. You know, my huge record for me was The Times They Were Changing That album. I swapped it with mate of mine at school for his dad's copy of No I got it. I got his dad's copy of The Times They Were Changing in exchange from

my copy of the Jackson Five's greatst Hits. It was a brilliant deal and.

my politics were broadly I suppose humanitarian. But where I was you know, when I went to Rock Against Racism, I was working in an office in London and the men I worked with were you know, casually racist, casually sexist, casually homophobic, and I really you know, didn't ever say anything or raise any questions. But going to Rock against Racism, see the clash we're playing, and that's kind of what

got us to go over the step. But going there and getting to the theres a park in Hackney called Victoria Park where it happened, and seeing eighty thousand kids just like me, I kind of realized that this issue is going to be what defines my generation, like Vietnam had defined the previous generation. We were going to define ourselves in opposition of an opposition to discrimination of all kinds, not just racism, but homophobia and sexism and everything else.

We were going to be the generation of two Tone. We were going to be the generation of artists against aparthe That's who we were going to be. And when I went back to work on Monday. The world hadn't changed, but my perception of it had and I knew why I was different from these arshols at work, you know, And so I'd stopped laughing when they made those comments, you know, I stopped joining him with you, pastor and the secretaries and stuff like that. I like, Okay, there's

something different now, you know. And that and that informs how I understand how music works when I'm doing a gig.

that's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for that empathy, you know, mate, Malcolm was listening to him on the radio one time and he talked about the ability to make people move people to tears without hurting them. You know, the ability to move people by emotion to tears is a very powerful thing. And then he played levs Stubs tears.

That made my ears pick up, I'll tell you. And it's very insightful, Malcolm, the touch on that, because it gave me a you know, a sudden flash of how the process works.

His pain somehow is her pain. She's got to pick herself up and put herself back togethering in now and Levi's obviously felt that as well, because you can hear it in the way that he sings, you know, when he cries out for Bernadette, you know, when he talks about the seven Rooms of Gloom. You know it's there, you know, very operatic. Yeah, just incredible voice. Incredible voice.

the British election I will talk about. But obviously, you know what's coming in November is very contentious at the moment, so I doubt let's be talking about that.

never spoke in public before. Talking to all these little punk rockers, it was an amazing thing to see because their husbands were either on the picket line or in prison. Right, that in itself was amazing to watch.

keeping on their sofa or in their spare room. You know, you go back and you know, you go back to their assimate your cup of team, maybe a bacon sandwich, and then they sit down and talk politics because they wanted to know why a pop star from London was doing this. Is it just for the fame or you actually walk the walk and talk the talk. So very quickly I had to sort of because I didn't I left go when I was sixteen, so I didn't have

a political education. I had to sort of learn the language of Marxism to be able to put across my ideas and define where I was coming from. That was a real sharp learning curve. But you know, it was a genuine radical situation. It was class. It was my class against the state, really, so I couldn't not take part. And also I'd listened to all these solo singer songwriters in the nineteen sixties trying to change the world through music, and now I had opportunity to see if you can

actually change the world. Does it actually work this? Can you go and sing songs and bring about social change? Because that's what the clash told me you could. Music will change the world, and I kind of believed that. Now I had a chance to find out if that was true or not. It turns out it's not.

people have already realized that things are not right. You realize you're not the only person who cares about this thing. And music can bring you together into an audience where you suddenly realize that like, ah okay, like as me rocking, it's racism. When I speak from experience here, that's what happened to me in Victoria Park in Hackney. I realized I wasn't the only person who cared about these things,

you know. And you know, when I make my pitch for a solidarity with the trans community, when I sing sexuality on these shows, they will undoubtedly be people my age, because my audience predominantly my age in you know, sixties,

who probably haven't given the issue much thought. It's not that they're anti or pro and even it's just something like they're like it's too much trouble, but they see themselves in an audience who are expressing solidarity with this, who are responding positively to what I'm saying, and they look around him and they think, Wow, maybe I should get off the fence on this, maybe have a think about what's going on here, because clearly this is an important issue to these people who I have so much

in come with. And that's how music can affect change, not directly, not storm the barricades' way, but just by planting ideas in people's minds, introducing them to different concepts, challenging their perceptions music. That's one of the things that music can do. It doesn't have to do it all the time. It's not the defining aspect of it, but

it's one of the many things it can do. And I think coming from a twentieth century music culture in which music was our social medium, which I had to articulate everything that my generation thought through music, and we had, you know, three four weekly music papers in the UK to thrash these ideas out. The idea that music should be something more than I'm great your shit, you like my socks to paraphrase Oasis is still important to me.

I don't know if younger people feel that way. It's not something that I'm going to say, listen, this is the way it should be. It's not my job to do that. I hear young people write songs about the pressure that they feel under. That's enough for me that they are talking about that, they are using music to articulate their feelings about that. I'm not going to start leaning them and say, why don't you write about trade unions. I'm not going to write that because they have not

been through the minor strike. They've had a different cultural perception, put culture experience to the one I've had.

sits on. But it was good. It was a challenge, you know, and coming as it did, I think, I think, if you're really really lucky, you get ten good years where people are interested in what you're doing, and you can, you know, you can feel that when you do something the media will be you know, give you a front page and stuff like that. If you get ten years, you're really really lucky. And that comes at the end of kind of that period where I was, you know,

I got me on top of the pops. Everybody at home thinks it was a huge hit record, which actually I only got to number twenty six in the charts. But you know the perception of it is that that's what it was.

Check out this Ciddy of a thousand Lives. This is a song about an American photographer that you've never heard of, who does incredible images that are all of herself. Here it is Sherman. Yeah, Cindy Sherman, the great Cindy Sherman. And so yeah, I was. I was incredibly and still am incredibly proud of that record, but I couldn't carry on a natural dijectory. You know. It was sort of

like who want me? So fortunately then I made William Blake, which was a much more personal record, much more a post parenthood record which I'm which I'm very proud of as well.

up blood. Look I'm dying. He never did. He never said it, so I don't know. My brother, who's five years younger than me. He was at school at the time, and I was there when my father died. My brothers never asked me about it. And I respect that. I'm not going to suddenly turn up and say to him and listen, I'm going to tell you what happened that day. If he doesn't want to know, he doesn't want to know, and I respect that. But I was in a very weird situation where I never spoke to it about anybody

I ever. I spoke to it what happened to anybody. And then one day I was writing a song and a line came out. I closed my eye and when I looked, your name was in the memorial book. And now where my father's ashes are scattered, they have a book there on the anniversary of the day of his death, which opens on the page and his name's there. And I used to go to it my mum on the anniversary and look at the book and go and visit. That's what we did. And this line, I was like, oh, now,

this is interesting. If I go down this path, I'm going to be in a situation where I have to talk to strangers about what happened. How do I feel about that? I wasn't really sure how I felt about that, but nonetheless I wrote that song in the next hour. It just came out. Who like a there. It was fully formed around that old who had that guitar lick. That's what I was writing the other song to that guitar lick. So the next time was rehearsing in my keyboard player car TV I taught at the piano part

played the song. She said, Oh, that's about your dad, don't it. I said, yeah, it is Cary. Yeah. So I thought, well, if she didn't get it like that, obviously it you know, it's hits the mark. So I started playing it live and it had that effect. People would come and talk to me about someone that they

had lost, and still do. People write to me and say, you know, your song really helped me to process things about how my father or whoever lost, and it's great to be able to write back to them and say, you know what made it. It had exactly the same effect on me. It helped me to process how I felt about the loss of my father, to the extent that I can now talk about it without being overcome with emotion, and so, you know, I'm really pleased to

have a song about that. My mum, whenever I played in London or where she came to see me play, she would always say, before you're going to play that song, aren't you. I don't think she even knew what it was called, play that song. And I would play the song, of course. I would play the song nervously while she

was there, you know, so self consciously. And then my nephews will say to me, why do you keep playing that song that makes Nan cry every time we come and see you, And I'll be like, boys, Asher Nan, all right, And then I tell you, yeah.

no idea. Cindy of a Thousand Lives was about Cindy Sherman.

so weird. It was so weird. I saw it and I bought it, and I thought, what the heck, kiss this? What madness? What strange weirdness. I mean, America's a weird enough place if you've never been here before, but that's,

to me, summed up the weirdness of America. And I subsequently found out what it was and who she was, and I bought her, you know, coming to the US back and forth in the eighties, I was able to find, you know, books about her exhibitions and stuff, and it always intrigued me what she was doing that, you know, putting herself in the in the absolutely in the art as a songwriter, that's something that you try and do.

You try and put yourself in there, even subconsciously. Sometimes you don't realize you're doing it, putting yourself in there. So I was very much attracted to that, and when I got those weird chords, the song kind of sort

of developed out of that. Going back to those, I think they call them a murder pictures, a kind of like weird scary periods she went through, which I think it comes after the original, sort of like cinema scenes, untitled pictures that are really really There's something about the United States America that's very strange to people coming from my country is the vastness of it and the fact most of it isn't inhabited. Well Springsteen referred to as the darkness on the edge of town. We don't have

much of that in my country. You might have the darkness on the edge of town, but you can probably see another town just up the ways a bit. You don't have that bit where the town ends and there's the piney woods, and the piney woods go on for miles and miles, and you know, when you're flying in over New Jersey sometimes it's piney, piney, piney, piney woods. And then while there's New York, it's that like it's

like the moors around Manchester. You know they're coming there, kind of stand around, and as a European you get that weird in the pines thing and something that those Cindy Sherman postcards from that period of her her art really spoke to me about that, that you know, what's out there in the majority of on any given night, the majority of the United States America is in complete and out of darkness. That's a weird thing to someone coming from a little island off the coast of Europe.

and she said no. She was very flattered by it. Particularly, she said particularly I've never met him, as if I'd need to meet her to be able to write a song like that, because I don't really need you.

great line that is. It's such a great line. I saw him at Meadowlands on born in USA, too blew my mind. He made it feel like a club, just did my head in completely. I was like, I mean, the trouble is I think maybe it's just I don't know, it might just be me. Maybe all performances like this.

But when you go and see a songwriter or you know, somebody who does a job similar to your job, you spend all your time analyzing what they're doing, how they're doing that, why are they doing that, what's going on there? You know, it gets in the way of watching Elvis Costello. It's impossible for me to enjoy Bob Dylan gig. I'm trying to all the time think you know what's going on here? But Springsteen was just like.

and you realize, actually, there's amazing songs in there. And you pull out the amazing ones and you realize there are brilliant songs in there, and you have to go back put some back in the box they come out of and you realize that, and then you get on a thread, and then you realize that, yeah, you get a bit of paper and it's got written on the bit of you know, it's a song here, but the top of the bit of paper someone what he's written way over yonder in the minor key. You're like that,

what does that mean? You go through morning and you see again, you know, way over yonder in the minor kin and maybe a little bit more of a scrubble lewick. And eventually you come to a song that says, let's got way over yonder in the minor key in the chorus, and you realize it, he's left your paper trail. They kind of find somebody to find and connect with his song.

was only kind of up on a pedestal. It was the dust Bowl balladeer, and she rightly pointed out that he actually lived half his life in New York City, down on Coney Island, at a time when New York City was perhaps the most exciting cultural city in the world. You know, from nineteen thirty nine until he died in nineteen sixty seven, he was here in New York. So she wanted that aspect of him to come out. You know, everyone had heard the dust Body was one song early on.

Because Woody often wrote the tunes to traditional tunes, there was one song called My thirty thousand that was clearly because the lyric, the opening line was written to the tune of an old American folk song called Jesse James. Jesse James was the man that Lay's children. They were brave that tune. And I very proudly, when I'd got the first stuff, played it to her and said, yeah, look I've got the and she was like, yeah, We've

got plenty of songs like that. Billy. I was like, oh, okay, you want me to, and she was frying songs at me that were, you know, totally contrary to people's perception of Woody Guffrey, and it was her generosity and encouragement. That led me to choose songs like Ingrid Bergman, where he talks about making love to the Swedish film star on the slope some Italian volcano, My Flying Saucer where he goes for a ride on a flying saucer. Not

things you would think about, would he Gusriye. But to take Woody on board, I mean you mentioned the Grapes of Wroth, the movie Henry Fonder in the Grapes of Wrath. Perhaps in people's mind they associate Woody with that Sepia tone period, but yeah, he was there. He did write

songs in there. But he also lived in New York in the forties, so you also have to imagine him in the movie On the Town with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, the two sailors who are chasing women around New York City in nineteen forty in technicolor in full color, which incidentally ends in Coney Island. They chase the girls to the Coney Island funfair. Wood he lived in that world. He wrote many of those songs in that world. That's why Nora chose to call the album Mermad Avenue, because

to focus on that world. So we were out to challenge people's perceptions too, as Norris to reboot a father's image, and that's why we kicked off with what Whitman's niece. So nobody would have any preconceptions that we were going to be reverent with the little guy. That's not what Laura asked us to do. She asked us to shake

him up. And with regard to it sounding modern, one of the you know, there wasn't many templates for doing a project like that, But Jeff and I, I think at the time Grail Marcus book Invisible Republic had come out about the recording of the Basement Tapes, and I certainly read it. I know Jeff had read it as well, and I said to him, look, you know, we're this is a bit like the Basement Tapes in the sense that I don't know if your listeners are familiar with.

Many of the songs in the Basement Tapes were old timey songs. They weren't all Bob Dylan songs that Bob had written. A lot of the songs they played were old folks songs they were messing around with. And I said to Jeff, this is kind of what we're doing we're kind of we're kind of messing around with these old songs. But the thing about the basement tapes, you knew that the although they were playing these old timey songs, the people that were playing them had heard Little Richard,

you know, they'd heard rock and roll. They were in that vernacular. So we got to make these records and people have got to know that we have heard the clash. People have got to know that we've heard cheap trick. You know, the Wilkos were big cheap trick fans. I'm like, yeah, bring it on, you know, bring it on. We've got we've got a opportunity here to take these songs and kind of like dress them up anyway. It's like going to the dressing up box every day and who we're

going to be today. Let's be Tom Waits today on Meanest Man, you know, let's be Vanilla Fudge, Let's be you know, let's just be weird. Let's just take these songs apart and put them back together again in a different way. And the freedom to do that is why we ended up recording fifty three tracks rather than fifteen tracks, which we were contracted to do, not least because nort We were in Dublin, Nora. We invited Nora over for a holiday for a week. She bought another sheaf of songs

and started the old bloody process. Yeah. Yeah, she suddenly turned up with you know, another Man's Done Gone. What an incredible song that is? You know so and it was a joy to do. I mean, I really enjoyed the whole process because hitherto I'd been the guy in the studio where everything had to go through me. We had, you know, every decision, what songs next, how do you want to record it? When are we having a t break?

What biscuits are we having? You know everything. Whereas in that process there was it was a you know, a two andre if not a three andder with Jay Bennett as well, between me, Jeff and Jay and the band. You know, we were taking it in turns. It was what we're going to do next?

be death to cynicism. And by cynicism, I don't mean skepticism. I think that's healthy, it's helpful. I don't mean doubt. Never trust anyone who has no doubts. I'm talking about those people who've given up and they want you to give up as well, and it makes them feel better about the decision they've made. I've no time for those people, you know. To me, you know, cynicism is what makes you think nothing will ever change. Cynicism is what makes

you fear that nobody else cares about this stuff. It's what Fox News want you to believe. And I'm, you know, like Woody, I'm you know, committed to destroying that feeling in people then kicking it to the curve as often as I can not to say that I'm not prone

to my own cynicism. How could you not be? The way politics have gone in the last thirty years, But you have to fight it all the time in order to recognize that the glasses half full, and that if ordinary people are given the opportunity to pull the leaves of power, we would live in a better world. You have to believe in people and what they what they do.

I said, can't we do it? You know, it would be more interested to do a road trip somewhereere I've never been in America. And they said, well, where would you like to go in America that you've never been. I said, I'd like to go to Rock Island, where the Rock Island Line comes from. And the guy said to me, where's that? I said, I don't know. It turns out it's in in the far west of Illinois

on the border with Iowa. It's the mississ the Mississippi divides, and it's where they built the first bridge across the Mississippi. So we went there, and we drove down to Arkansas, where the song Rock Island line comes from. And when we went to the railway station there, we wanted to

get the midnight train to come in. So we do a photo with the midnight train and it come in and it sat there for forty minutes, just sat there and what's that about and it turns out that there are so few passenger trains outside the Northeast corner that when a passenger train like one a day really on that line through Little Rock where we were, they have to stay in the railway station let the freight train through. They used the railway station almost like a side in.

And it turned out I got the schedule, and it turned out it stopped in every big city forty minutes. And it occurred to me that you could use that time to record a song. You get off the train, go into the waiting room, find a suitably acoustic corner, play a train song, jump back on the train, and keep going, play some on the train maybe you know.

And so you know, Joe Henry had produced my album before that, Tooth and Nail, and he's a dear friend of mine, Joe, I love him the bits, and I came up with this cockamaney idea and he said, yeah, that would be brilliant. So over the course of three or four days we were on the train, and it was it was a revelation because the train comes through the kind of what was it, iggy pop call at the ripped back sides of the city. Because you're you know,

you're you're slowing down to go over the roads. Yeah, you're slowing down to go over the roads. And you're looking in someone's backyard in their parlor. You see them all sitting there having a dinner. It's in America. I certainly never seen. And my compadres who are working with me, Joe and the guy who recorded it and the guys who took some photos and did some filming, they were blown away by this. And they've never been on a training before, I don't think. Really, Yeah, it's really strange.

They were like, wow, this is like a completely different you know, it kind of comes down the from Chicago, comes down to San Antonio and then it kind of follows the Rio Grande and uh and then off across Arizona into into Union Station in Los Angeles. And we had the best time in the trains had you know, they have a shower on there. We have a dining car and they always sit here on a table with people that you haven't sat with before, so that that's

always someone who and who's on the trains. The people on the trains are either tourists, people who worked on the railways or their father worked on the railways, and people who don't want to show their idea an airport are on trains. So it's a really interesting trip. When you sit down and talk to people at the table, you know, it's what you're doing and we are you know, you learn, We learn a lot.

the board is goodbye. So we just had to listen out for the second all the board and make sure we were on our way back to the train so we didn't get left behind. One of the things about Amtrak is their schedule was a bit a bit hit and miss. Yeah. One of the guys English guys said that they got in twenty four hours late to Union

and it's only a forty eight hour train journey. They got in a whole day late due to problems with freight trains on the line, and we were do to get into Union Station, Los Angeles at kind of seven am. We've got it at four am, and the one time ever they were early, we got it at four am. But it was cool because we ended up finding nobody about. We found this loveliest space to record our last song, which was Early Morning Rain by Gordon Lightfoot, which compares

the jetplane to the railways. A brilliant, brilliant song. And where we sang it was behind us there was a little garden square and as we sang it, the birds began to wake up. They must have heard us, and they started singing, and you can hear them just in the background starting to sing in the bushes behind us as he's starting to get light. It was a brilliant, brilliant experience, and I encourage any of you out there we want to see a different kind of America to

take the trip. There's another route to Los Angeles goes through the Rockies, the California Zephyr. We went on the Texas Eagle, but it really is an amazing experience and it's and given the grief you have to go through,

to go through airports to get around America. I don't know why there isn't a high speed train link, you know, San Francisco to Los Angeles, a bullet train, you know, as the atmosphere gets more turbulent, the possibility of high speed trains, I think you really should check it out, because the trains that make America. America before the trains is a completely different place to America after the training.

Before the train, it was only really feasible to build settlements inland on rivers because you just couldn't get the stuff there was, you know, too many piney woods in the way, you know, so all the big towns and the big cities are all on the great rivers. Once the railway comes, then you know, it opens the whole continent up. And I don't think doing the record and doing the research that went with it, I don't think there's ever been a more transformative technology for humankind than

the railroad. The change it brings for thousands of years of nothing being able to go faster than a horse could gallup or ship could sail, suddenly to have something that not could only go at a higher speed, but could connect you directly to anywhere in the continent, so that you could order something from Chicago and it would arrive two or three days later, it would physically be there.

It's so much more, I think, so much more revolutionary than the Internet what we've experienced in our lifetimes, which is in itself revolutionary. But you know, Amazon is nothing to the ability of people to order something from a catalog out east and it end up in this tiny little town in wherever, you know, Nevada or whatever, something

like that, and also people could get on it. I mean, so many of those those blue songs about the railroad because that was another level of emancipation for African Americans to get to the big cities up north where you weren't constantly you know, there was of course there was still racism. Of course there was still discrimination, but it wasn't the Jim Crow type up there. That emmancipatory nature of the railroads in America was That's why we wanted to take them songs back there.

obsessed with Jane Austin. It's all going back to that prelapse area period before the Industrial Revolution, before the railroad came, there was this kind of you know, dizzy kind of Garden of Eden vibe with the aristocracy and all that kind of stuff. It's very interesting how the railroad comes to symbolize modernity and any on dynamicism, and particularly in this continent, it changes everything.

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